Oral History Center
Women Faculty at UC Berkeley: Oral Histories of Excellence
By Natalie Naylor
Natalie Naylor is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing. She has worked as a student editor for the Bancroft Library’s Oral History Center since July 2024 and also wrote “Berkeley SLATE-d for Back to School: Student Community in the Sixties.”
In 1870, the Regents of the University of California system voted to admit women on the same basis as men. Since then, female members of the faculty, staff, and student body have been inextricable from the University of California’s achievements and legacy. This Women’s History Month, the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library would like to highlight interviews from female faculty members who achieved historic “firsts” at the University of California, Berkeley. The four Professors featured in this blog post were interviewed as a part of the Oral History Center’s Education and University of California, African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley, and Women Political Leaders projects.
Herma Hill Kay was the second woman ever hired to UC Berkeley’s Law faculty in 1960, following the impending retirement of their first female professor, Barbara Armstrong. Kay taught at Berkeley Law for an astonishing fifty-seven years, during which the number of female faculty and students greatly increased as a direct result of her efforts. Germaine LaBerge, the interviewer for Kay’s oral history, recalls “Only fourteen women anywhere in the United States had become law professors before Professor Kay joined the faculty at Boalt Hall [now Berkeley Law].” In addition to her historic tenure, when Kay was “selected as Boalt’s first woman dean in 1992, she was adding to a long list of ‘firsts’ that, taken together, make an exceptional story” (pg. i).
Kay devoted her career to furthering the rights of women, specifically pursuing cases concerning sex-based discrimination and California marital property laws. As a result, Kay contributed to the conception of the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. In her oral history, she attributed her passion for women’s rights to a firm belief in legal equality for all: “I’ve always felt very strongly—and this came from my father—that women ought to be free and conscious actors. They ought to determine their own role in this world. So I was very opposed to anything that would stand in the way of their self-realization. I feel the same way about racial equality. There shouldn’t be any barriers placed in front of anybody to do what that person wants to do and is able to do.” (Kay 2005, pg. 76) In addition to her academic achievements, Kay played a pivotal role in forming both the Berkeley Faculty Women’s Club in 1969 and the Boalt Hall’s Women’s Association. She passed away at the age of eighty-two in 2017, but her legacy and impact on the law community at UC Berkeley remains evident to this day.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs began teaching at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare in 1979 and earned tenure as a full professor in 1986. Shortly after, in 1993, Gibbs earned an endowed appointment as the Zellerbach Family Fund Professor of Social Policy, Community Change and Practice—a position she held until her retirement in 2000. She became the first African American professor appointed to the position of endowed chair across the UC system. The Oral History Center interviewed Gibbs in 2003 and 2004 as a part of their African American Faculty and Senior Staff Oral History Project. Over the course of her career at the University, she contributed to several key dialogues in African American Studies. These included articles and books she wrote on “minority mental health, young Black men in America, and the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King cases” (pg. v). Gibbs also testified before the U.S. Congress concerning her research on young Black males.
Gibbs devoted her scholarly and personal pursuits to furthering justice and equality for several minority groups, which she detailed during her oral history: “So, this whole idea of all of the early influences which were around social justice from my family, my father and growing up in the church, have kind of really been a very, very deep influence on me in my work, coming back to that and looking at it in the last book that I did and even now things that I’m doing, the kinds of things I’m going to volunteer doing, it’s really coming back to civil rights, human rights, and women’s rights and how we can make our communities work better for minorities, poor people, the disadvantaged people and women. And that’s what I have done” (Gibbs 2010, pg. 424). Upon her retirement in late 2000, Gibbs earned the Berkeley Citation, the University’s highest honor awarded to individuals “whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.”
As the first woman tenured by the UC Berkeley Anthropology department, Laura Nader had an extensive impact on the University’s history and culture. She joined the faculty in 1960, the same year Herma Hill Kay started at Berkeley Law. Nader published ten books and around 290 other publications over the course of her career. As an influential and popular professor at UC Berkeley, she taught thousands of undergraduate students and supervised more than one-hundred PhD students. She recounted one of these popular classes in her oral history interview: “I puzzled because I never really understood why do students love the course Controlling Processes so much? Why do they remember it? Like the woman who said, ‘I took a course from you ten years ago.’ And I said, ‘You remember it?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it was Controlling Processes.’ Why do they remember it? They don’t remember any courses from one semester to another; who taught it and whatever it is. Their memories are worse than seventy-five year olds. So it opens their eyes to something. But why are our eyes closed? We’re not looking at reality in this country and many people are saying this now.” (Nader 2014, pg. 88)
Nader also taught at several other prestigious universities across the country, such as Yale Law, Harvard Law, and Stanford. Her research explored the interactions of law, anthropology, and energy science, specifically in indigenous Mexican cultures and the Middle East. Nader served as an ambassador for both the UC Berkeley community and the field of anthropology more broadly. As a result of her contributions to law and anthropology, she received the Law and Society Association’s 1995 Kalven prize for distinguished research. Experts across disciplines have commended her theoretical and ethical approaches to her research questions.
In the fall of 1976, Gloria Bowles taught the first cohort of students in the Women’s Studies department at UC Berkeley and served as its founding coordinator. She taught throughout the University of California system at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis for much of her career as a professor in Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies. She recalled, “In a sense, the women’s movement came to me through my students, because in one of those proposal meetings, they accepted my proposal for Comp Lit 40A, the undergraduate course. I had a wonderful group of women. Of course, these women were so excited to be reading women writers.” (Bowles 2021, page 16)
Bowles, like the other professors highlighted in this blog post, considered the Women’s Liberation Movement in conjunction with other Civil Rights movements taking place during the 20th century. “Feminist was not a word we used when we were undergraduates in Ann Arbor. I think we were more obsessed with civil rights. The women’s movement followed civil rights, and the Women’s Studies Program followed Ethnic Studies, and one movement came and another. I think probably thinking about civil rights causes you to think about your rights, or lack thereof—and of course, totally different, depending on your class and color. I think that I always thought about things like that, although I didn’t give them labels.” (Bowles 2021, page 17)
After her retirement from academia. Bowles established the Berkeley Women’s Studies Movement Archive at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Bowles influenced the Bay Area’s feminist culture and paved the way for generations of female scholars to come.
Conclusion
Herma Hill Kay, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Laura Nader, and Gloria Bowles all achieved historic milestones and paved the way for future generations of female students and faculty at UC Berkeley. Without their contributions, UC Berkeley would be drastically different from the community we know today. They are just four of the dozens of influential women faculty members that the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviewed. To find more fascinating oral histories like these, explore the Education and University of California and African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley oral history projects. For additional information, explore the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley history project, which includes Oral Histories of Berkeley Women.
Read the full oral histories of these women:
Herma Hill Kay, “Herma Hill Kay: Professor, 1960-Present, and Dean, 1992-2000, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley,” interview by Germaine LaBerge in 2003, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, “Jewelle Taylor Gibbs,” interview by Leah McGarrigle in 2002, 2003 and 2004, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2010.
Laura Nader, “Laura Nader: A Life of Teaching, Investigation, Scholarship and Scope,” interview by Samuel Redman and Lisa Rubens in 2013, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.
Gloria Bowles, “Gloria Bowles: The Founding of Women’s Studies,” conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2021, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.
Additional Sources:
“Berkeley Citation | Berkeley Awards.” 2025. Berkeley.edu. 2025. https://awards.berkeley.edu/university-awards/berkeley-citation/.
“Iconic Professor and Former Berkeley Law Dean Herma Hill Kay Dies at 82.” 2022. UC Berkeley Law. March 24, 2022. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/article/iconic-professor-former-berkeley-law-dean-herma-hill-kay-dies-82/.
“Laura Nader | Anthropology.” Anthropology.berkeley.edu, anthropology.berkeley.edu/laura-nader.
“‘Something Has to Change’: Collection Explores Movement behind UC Berkeley’s Women’s Studies Program.” 2021. UC Berkeley Library. 2021. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/womens-studies.
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
george a. miller (1936-2025)
We are sad to announce the passing of george miller (his preference for lower-case spelling).
George entered the world of The Bancroft Library in 1997, shortly after his retirement and originally as a volunteer helping to process the records in the history of water rights and engineering in California. George had had a storied career in finance, bearing witness to and shaping some of the key developments in the US finance industry in the last half of the twentieth century. Most notable was his idea of passive investment in the form of an index fund, which would track a basket of top-performing stocks, premised on the notion that the growth of the market over time would beat active money managers. While at Bancroft, George also became captivated by the collection of oral histories produced by the Oral History Center. Over time, he began to make contributions to the archive by sponsoring oral histories with key figures in Bay Area politics, environmental activism, and journalism.
It was through this engagement with oral history that my predecessor Martin Meeker eventually persuaded George to do his own oral history. An important theme of George’s oral history is his philanthropic calling, which he described as “graduating from his day job … to more productive things.” A great feature of a life history is that one gets a sense of when values or passions took root. Early on, George developed a sense of duty, which led to a distinguished vocation as a philanthropist to institutions and causes dear to him, repaying the opportunities he was given, not just to his almae matres, UPenn and Cal, but to his community, to young students, to his city, his state, and to the world.
George was known for the pithy sayings that his friends and family called GAMOs – “george a. miller observations.” Underlying many of them was a pragmatic outlook on life, for example, “time is like money; you can only spend it once.” He took one of his father’s aphorisms to heart throughout his life as well, “There’s nothing sadder than something done well that shouldn’t be done at all.” Taking great care to identify what was worth fighting for, he was humble about his ability to bring about change. Musing on this, he proposed his own obituary: “He lived. He cared. He tried. Then he gave up.” But this is someone who spent thirty-five years finding a way to derive steady revenue from the chaos of the market. He invested where he thought he could have an impact. He cared and tried enough to build a credit union in Vietnam from the ground up to 160,000 members, fund the education of hundreds of students at UC Berkeley, make improvements to small-claims courts across the country, support environmental organizations, help revive the Market Street Railway, and secure the future of a beloved bar and grill in San Francisco, to name just a few of his accomplishments.
His friends called George “a piece of work.” He made a cheeky, no-nonsense difference in the world, a difference that we at The Bancroft Library and the Oral History Center have felt deeply and will miss.
Nuclear Complexity and Oral History: Brianna Iswono’s Undergraduate Research, Fall 2024
by Brianna Iswono
Brianna Iswono is a third-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley majoring in chemical engineering. Throughout the Fall 2024 semester, Brianna worked with Roger Eardley-Pryor of the Oral History Center to earn academic credits through Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP). URAP provides opportunities for undergraduates to work closely with Berkeley scholars on cutting edge research projects for which Berkeley is world-renowned. In this post, Brianna reflects on her research about nuclear power as it appeared in the Oral History Center archives.
As a chemical engineering student at UC Berkeley, my coursework only briefly touches on topics of nuclear power and energy. I wanted to learn more and my curiosity deepened as I saw more and more headlines about nuclear energy in news articles and social media. To dive deeper, in the fall of 2024 I joined Berkeley’s URAP (Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program) under the mentorship of historian Roger Eardley-Pryor at the Oral History Center, where I analyzed various oral histories and technical reports about nuclear energy. Through this experience, what I discovered was not only a stronger interest in nuclear power, but a field marked by polarizing perspectives and profound complexity—one where simple answers do not exist.
Nuclear power stands as one of the most reliable carbon-free energy sources available today. Unlike fossil fuels, it produces no carbon dioxide during electricity generation, which makes nuclear power a critical tool in the fight against climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Given the growing urgency for energy facilities to reduce their overall emissions, nuclear power offers a viable option for large-scale, reliable energy production. As former Sierra Club president, mountaineer, biophysicist, and Berkeley Lab energy analyst William E. Siri noted in his oral history in the late 1970s, “Coal is a very dirty fuel… That leaves nuclear as one clean energy source until solar and other energy sources are fully developed.” Today, solar and wind are more developed, but the energy they generate drops when the sun sets or when winds cease. By providing steady, continuous power, nuclear energy complements intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, ensuring grid stability. This reliability reduces the need for fossil fuel-based backup systems and thus helps mitigate climate change.
However, nuclear power is not without its environmental challenges. The construction and operation of plants can disrupt local ecosystems, particularly since they are often built in rural areas rich in biodiversity and ecological value. Habitat disruption, deforestation, and the high demand for water used in reactor cooling all remain significant concerns. The presence of nuclear plants places an increased strain on local water resources, particularly in underserved regions already facing water scarcity. In the first of his two archived oral history interviews, David Brower, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental organization, explained about the Club’s consideration of nuclear power, “You certainly haven’t helped the poor by degrading the environment, the working place, by not getting into the battles to protect them from the chemicals that they’re exposed to.”
Also, the visual impact of large nuclear facilities can dramatically alter the character of scenic areas. At least in California, public opposition was fueled historically by concern that industrial structures for nuclear power detracts from the natural beauty and environment of rural areas, making them appear stark and out of place. Laurence I. Moss, former Sierra Club president and nuclear engineer, worked directly on construction of nuclear reactors. Moss shared in his oral history, “In my mind it was always a location issue. That was not the right place to put a nuclear power plant, or any industrial facility. I would not want to put a residential development there, anything that would alter the natural environment for the worse.” Moss’s perspective highlights the tension between technological advancement and environmental preservation, underscoring the importance of careful site selection to balance progress with respect for natural landscapes.
Another major challenge, and perhaps the most pressing, is the management of nuclear waste. Nuclear reactors generate long-lived radioactive waste that requires secure, long-term storage, and even the most advanced waste repositories carry the risk of leakage or contamination over the thousands of years that spent nuclear fuel remains toxic. Efforts to manage nuclear waste have included ambitious ideas such as deep-sea disposal or even launching the waste into the sun. However, these approaches fail to fully eliminate the risk of leakage, especially given the exceptionally long timescales over which the waste must remain secure, and they often introduce additional challenges. As Thomas H. Pigford, the founding chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, explained in his oral history from the late 1990s,“Another more attractive approach is to shoot the radioactive waste into the sun, which would require concentrating it to reduce the weight. And that’s where it belongs, because the sun is so radioactive. But there, the technical challenge or problem is the abort rate of missiles, of space vessels, and so when consulting the people in NASA, we concluded that that was just untenable.” Such unresolved issues remain a central concern for environmental advocates, highlighting the ongoing tension between the potential of nuclear power as a clean energy source and the ecological risks it poses.
Economically, nuclear power presents both opportunities and challenges. Once operational, nuclear reactors have relatively low fuel and operating costs compared to many other energy sources. Uranium, the main fuel used, is highly energy-dense, requiring only small amounts to generate large quantities of energy. This efficiency makes nuclear power a cost-effective solution to meet large-scale energy demands, providing a reliable supply of energy at a lower long-term cost while still delivering the high output needed to sustain industrial and societal needs. After working directly with the economic analysis of nuclear plant construction in the 1960s, Moss shared, “we were able to show that other alternatives, specifically a nuclear power alternative, built in those years could provide power at lower cost than the dams.” Nuclear power also has an extensive reach that goes far beyond reactors, influencing a wide range of industries and technologies. The advancements and expertise gained through working with radiation and the advanced technologies required for waste facilities have helped with the development of new medical technologies used to measure radiation. Professor Pigford was directly involved in establishing the nuclear engineering curriculum at Berkeley and saw its expansion into related medical technologies. In his oral history, Pigford shared “Yes, well, there are plenty of jobs in waste disposal. And they are emphasizing more and more the interaction with the bioengineering program, which, as you probably know, is a new push on the campus. There’s a new department, and they’ve even gone into the field of tomography, which is doing scans on the brain and on the rest of the body. These involve nuclear reactions and so the development of instrumentation for that, techniques of sensing the nuclear radiations and interpreting them, is occupying more and more time.” Pigford’s insight highlights how nuclear engineering graduates have the opportunity to apply their expertise to innovations in health-related technologies, such as medical imaging.
Yet, a major economic challenge of nuclear power is the huge initial investment needed to build a plant. Designing, constructing, and meeting regulatory standards for a single nuclear plant can cost billions of dollars. While the long-term operating costs are lower, the upfront costs to begin production are much higher than those of other energy sources.This creates a significant barrier, particularly for developing countries that may also lack the technical expertise or regulatory infrastructure needed to operate plants safely. In his oral history, Siri captured the economic trade-off and complexity of nuclear power. Siri noted, “The more countries that have nuclear power plants, particularly the less advanced countries, the more likelihood there will be of meltdowns, simply because many such countries don’t have the technical base on which to maintain such an industry.” For these countries, nuclear power offers a chance to advance economically, but it also comes with the greater risk of catastrophic failure.
On the global stage, nuclear technology carries a sense of prestige. Non-nuclear nations often see other nations with advanced nuclear developments as leaders in innovation, which enhances their national pride and elevates their international status. The high demand for uranium to fuel nuclear reactors has led various countries to form alliances or joint ventures, employing any means necessary to secure a share of the advancements in nuclear technology. Roy Woodall, an Australian geologist known for his contributions to the mining and exploration industries, directly engaged with the mining sector to meet the growing global demand for uranium. In his oral history from the early 2000s, Woodall shared, “There was quite a lot of interest from other overseas companies in looking for uranium in Australia, so we formed a joint venture to look for conglomerate-type uranium deposits in Northern Western Australia.” His experience highlights the global scramble for uranium resources, reflecting how the race for nuclear technology has spurred both national and international collaboration.
However, the social risks associated with nuclear power are significant. Public fear of radiation exposure, which can lead to various health risks, has been intensified by past large-scale nuclear accidents like Fukushima and Three Mile Island, along with the media frenzy surrounding them. When reflecting on nuclear concerns during his oral history in 2019, Michael R. Peevey, a UC Berkeley alumnus, former electric utility executive, and previous president of the California Public Utilities Commission, recalled “But we had Chernobyl in Russia, which was a disaster; it’s a lingering disaster today.” Such concern has resulted in widespread resistance to the construction of new nuclear reactors and calls to shutdown existing ones. Grassroots movements and anti-nuclear campaigns have further fueled this opposition, creating a broad social aversion to nuclear power.
David E. Pesonen is a UC Berkeley alumnus, attorney, and environmental activist best known for his leadership role in the battle to defeat a PG&E nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay in the early 1960s. In his oral history recorded in the late 1990s, Pesonen explained his motivation for spreading the anti-nuclear power agenda. “Mainly because of the waste disposal problem. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know that anybody does. And also because I think the design of the generation of plants that we are involved with is inherently unsafe.” Despite the advanced safety features of modern plants, the widespread fear and skepticism continue to challenge the nuclear industry, highlighting the complex intersection of technological progress, environmental concerns, and public perception.
After conducting this oral history research and diving into the different aspects of nuclear power, I have come to realize that this field is inherently complex. I am still unsure where I stand in these debates, but one thing is clear: nuclear energy shouldn’t be dismissed outright. A recent LA Times article notes that, as energy-demanding technologies like AI continue developing rapidly, the demand for energy will only increase and all carbon-free options must be considered, especially in light of climate change. At the same time, we cannot ignore the risks that nuclear power poses. I think that the best approach is to carefully consider all non-fossil energy sources, such as nuclear or renewable, to make informed choices. Nuclear power is neither entirely good nor entirely bad; it is a complex and multifaceted technology with the potential for significant benefits and serious risks. Attitudes will likely continue to shift back and forth, but embracing the complexities of nuclear power is important to making wise decisions about its future role in meeting global energy needs. Reflecting on my semester of oral history research, I am grateful to have taken this URAP opportunity, as it gave me valuable insight and a new understanding of nuclear power that I always hoped to explore. Nuclear power is a complicated yet astonishing field, and I hope others can be informed on it to formulate their own stance on how to create a greener future.
Works Cited:
Haggerty, Noah. “Has Nuclear Power Entered a New Era of Acceptance Amid Global Warming?” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-18/a-new-generation-finds-promise-in-nuclear-energy.
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
From the Archives: Laurence I. Moss, Nuclear Engineer and Environmental Activist
by Brianna Iswono
Brianna Iswono is a third-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley majoring in chemical engineering. In the Fall 2024 semester, Brianna is working with Roger Eardley-Pryor of the Oral History Center to earn academic credits through Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP). URAP provides opportunities for undergraduates to work closely with Berkeley scholars on cutting edge research projects for which Berkeley is world-renowned. This “From the Archives” article emerged from Brianna’s research in the Oral History Center’s long standing Sierra Club Oral History Project.
Laurence I. Moss, who recorded his oral history in 1992, integrated engineering innovation with environmental protection in ways that inspire me as a chemical engineering student who wants to contribute towards sustainability. Today, efforts to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change are increasingly prominent in academia and technological industries. The surge of various electric cars, solar power installations, and increased sustainability awareness begs the question: how has this shift towards a more green future been feasible? This shift has required, and continues to require, technical developments with environmental goals. Laurence I. Moss was a nuclear engineer who, in the 1960s and 1970s, became a national leader in the Sierra Club. Moss used his technical expertise for advancements in engineering as well as developing processes to prioritize environmental protections.
Laurence I. Moss’s early life and education laid the groundwork for his expertise in engineering, equipping him with the technical knowledge to contribute meaningfully to the nuclear industry. Moss was born in 1935 during the Great Depression. He was raised in Queens and Brooklyn in New York City by parents who, as he said, believed deeply in the “American Dream.” He attended the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate. Driven by his passions in math and science, he described wanting a career where “people would be judged on their merits and on their ability to contribute.” Continuing to spark his interests and explore new fields, Moss completed a graduate program at MIT in nuclear engineering, a field he was previously unfamiliar with.
Moss’s work on nuclear reactors, particularly at Rockwell International, highlighted his ability to understand and improve cutting-edge technologies, a key skill that later influenced his advocacy for sustainable energy solutions. Prior to Rockwell International, Moss worked for nearly ten years at the Santa Susana nuclear field laboratory in Simi Hills where he designed and constructed various nuclear power reactors. He focused on developing safer nuclear technologies as the key engineer for testing so-called “critical experiments”—that is, low-power nuclear physics experiments conducted with nuclear reactors that avoid producing large amounts of fission products. This work laid a foundation for broader environmental impacts that he pursued in his later career at Rockwell International. Reflecting on his time at Rockwell, Moss shared, ”It was very rewarding too when you spend several months doing a highly theoretical calculation which makes certain assumptions about physical and nuclear properties, and predicts on the basis of these assumptions that a certain result will happen under these unusual circumstances. And then you go out and test it, and indeed that’s exactly what happens.” After acquiring first-hand experience managing nuclear-scale trials and operations, Moss joined the Sierra Club, and his work efforts soon transitioned towards processes that targeted innovative and renewable energy alternatives.
The personal connection Moss had to nature and his growing awareness of environmental issues, such as pollution and habitat destruction, inspired his shift towards engineering solutions that balanced technical progress with environmental preservation. His admiration of the natural environment grew from his youth in a rural setting where he spent most of his time outdoors. Later in life, seeing the effects of pollution in Los Angeles strengthened his belief that engineering should play a role in protecting the environment. Recalling these aspects, especially from his daily commute, Moss shared, “Another influence was the smog in the L.A. Basin. I remember my feelings at the end of the day, usually driving down from the Santa Susana Mountains to the San Fernando Valley and seeing a blanket of smog over the valley. Thinking about living in that polluted environment and how that had to change.” Seeing the impact of pollution firsthand inspired Moss to turn his personal convictions into action by using his engineering knowledge to advocate for environmental protections.
Moss became a prominent figure in the Sierra Club where he leveraged his engineering expertise for environmental advocacy, including influencing key decisions on energy production and infrastructure through a quantitative approach. He encapsulated his values by asserting, “I wanted to know how many pounds, how many tons, how much toxicity, how many people are at risk, what is the probability of distribution for the hazards, the number of people who can be affected by a single incident, and the consequences of that incident.” Moss joined the Sierra Club in 1959, remained active for over fifteen years, and served as the first non-Californian president of the Club from 1973 to 1974. His leadership was characterized by providing data and analytical information to illuminate the economic and environmental trade-offs of energy production and conservation. During his tenure, Moss opposed construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in central California, not in opposition to nuclear power, per se, but by emphasizing its potential dangers in an earthquake-prone area as well as concerns about the plant’s long-term sustainability. In Congressional hearings, he also contributed economic analyses to oppose dams in the Grand Canyon, and instead he advocated for nuclear power as a cleaner, more environmentally sustainable, and cost-effective alternative to burning coal or oil. Moss approached this argument by claiming the dams in the Grand Canyon were not necessary for the economic success of the Central Arizona Project (CAP). He shared, “Those dams were not the key factors in subsidizing the Central Arizona Project. One, we did the calculation that the Bureau of Reclamation did and took out both the costs of and the revenue from the two Grand Canyon dams. At the end of the fifty-year period, you ended up with about the same amount of money with the Central Arizona Project subsidized as with the dams in the calculation.” By merging his analytical mind and engineering expertise, Moss played a key role in broadening the Sierra Club’s mission, helping shift its focus strictly from wildlife conservation to address the broader environmental challenges of his time.
The oral history of Laurence I. Moss offers testimony to the crucial role that engineering and technical expertise can play in creating a safer, more environmentally friendly future. His integration of engineering and environmental protection inspires future generations of engineers like me, who hope to contribute to the sustainable engineering industry. Moss’s life, work, and advocacy emphasized deep interconnections between economics, engineering, and environmental action. He serves as a lasting source of inspiration for students and professionals who share his values in the ongoing pursuit for a healthier planet.
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
Richard Wyatt, Jr.: A Blessed Life of Art and Music
In February 2023, Dr. Bridget Cooks and I had the pleasure of interviewing the Los Angeles-based visual artist and songwriter Richard Wyatt, Jr., for the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Wyatt was a joy to interview, making us laugh constantly and sharing what he called Forrest Gump moments, where he was in the right place at the right time to meet and collaborate with celebrities of all stripes.
A little over a year after this delightful interview, Bridget and I were saddened to hear that Richard had passed away in May 2024. The world has lost a kind and funny man, as well as an talented artist, musician, educator, and thinker.
While I continue to mourn Richard’s passing, I also want to celebrate his life by highlighting the wonderful stories he shared in his oral history about life, art, music, and seeking new challenges.
Richard Wyatt, Jr., was an artist whose work includes drawings, paintings, installations, and public art. Wyatt was born in Lynwood, California, in 1955, and lived in the Los Angeles area his whole life. He began his art career early, winning the Watts Chalk-In at twelve years old, and then studying at the Watts Towers Art Center, the Chouinard Art Institute, and the Tutor/Art Program with artist Charles White. Wyatt attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BFA in art. Some of his best-known work in Los Angeles includes the mural Hollywood Jazz: 1945-1972 on the Capitol Records Building; the mural City of Dreams, River of History in Union Station; and the installation Ripple of Hope at Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park. Wyatt taught drawing and painting at the University of California, Irvine; the Otis Art Institute; and the Watts Towers Art Center. He also had a career as a songwriter, writing songs for musicians like The Miracles, The Sylvers, and New Edition.
One thing that continues to strike me about Richard is the indelible mark he has left on the world—and I mean that literally. Some of Richard’s best-known work was his public art, which adorned buildings and other public places in the Los Angeles area and beyond. For this reason, Bridget found interviewing Richard almost surreal. In the oral history, she explained, “…your work is part of my Los Angeles,” for indeed, Richard’s public art shaped the city in which she grew up. After our first day of interviews, Cooks and I drove around Downtown Los Angeles, pointing out and visiting sites where Richard’s work dotted the landscape: Union Station, Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park, the Capitol Records Building, and on and on.
One of Richard’s most famous murals, Hollywood Jazz: 1945-1972, remains on the Capitol Records Building, although he later replaced the paint on this south-facing exterior wall with ceramic tile to combat the ravages of the sun. When Richard accepted the commission for this work, it was the perfect blend of his love of visual art and his passion for music. In this mural, he memorialized jazz greats, such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and Nat King Cole. And in one of those Forrest Gump moments, Richard met musician Bonnie Raitt on site at the Capitol Records Building during his original installation. Listen as Richard recounted this moment:
Richard also mused about the role of an artist after unveiling a work of public art, sharing his thoughts on the impact of his public work: “…you can’t control it…Once it’s out there, it’s out there. People are going to interpret it and take pictures.” And while we spoke about the joys of creating art for wide public consumption, Richard also acknowledged some of the challenges inherent in this work. Listen as Richard shared about some of his public art work with collaborator and fellow artist May Sun:
Richard’s talent also extended to music, and resulted in a prolific career as a songwriter for musical artists such as The Miracles, The Sylvers, Peaches & Herb, Tavares, Johnny Gill, and New Edition. Richard wrote his first song, “Keep on Keepin’ On (Doin’ What You Do)” for The Miracles when he was just eighteen years old. But for Richard, visual art and music were always intertwined, as he experienced synesthesia, a sensory condition in which, among other things, allows some people see colors when they hear music. Richard explained his synesthesia this way:
“I didn’t even know that term until somebody else told me…When I’m writing, that’s one thing. But once I start arranging it and getting the bass and guitar, and then you get strings and horns, there are certain sounds that have a color associated with them. I can’t explain it, but…I see colors once I hear a certain sound, you know? And when I’m creating the arrangements, or even mixing or whatever, and I’m going for a certain effect, it’s like once you get mixing, to me it’s like glazing in oil. That’s the easiest way I can explain it.”
Richard was a child prodigy who burst into the art world when he was twelve years old, rubbing elbows with more experienced art world talents like Charles White, John Riddle, George Evans, and Bill Pajaud. Yet, Richard carved out a career all his own. And while he left us too soon, Richard’s art lives on. To celebrate this remarkable man and artist, I suggest spending time in Downtown Los Angeles and experiencing the work of Richard Wyatt, Jr., for yourself.
To learn more about Richard Wyatt, Jr.’s, extraordinary life and work, explore his oral history!
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Berkeley SLATE-d for Back to School: Student Community in the Sixties
By Natalie Naylor
Natalie Naylor is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing. She’s lived in the on-campus dorms, specifically Unit 2, and two Berkeley Student Cooperative properties during her time at UC Berkeley.
Well, it was magnificent! First of all, it was beautiful. I mean, Berkeley in the sixties was just a great place to be. It was very exciting; there were all kinds of new ideas. I loved my classes; I quickly made very good friends.
– Julianne Morris, SLATE Project
Berkeley in the 1960s is a time our campus and its surrounding community look back on with pride. During these years, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and community members participated in civil rights protests, antiwar activism, and, of course, the Free Speech Movement; these efforts are no doubt some of the most significant moments in Berkeley’s history. From the Mario Savio Free Speech Movement Café to the Martin Luther King Jr. Building and Free Speech Monument in Upper Sproul Plaza, the built environment referencing social activism in the sixties incorporates physical tributes to this time throughout UC Berkeley’s contemporary campus.
Sixty years later, as the Fall 2024 semester begins, it’s easy to feel as though that time in our history is completely removed from the present. However, students in the 1960s were concerned with issues familiar to UC Berkeley’s current student body: housing, humanitarianism, belonging, freedom of speech, and community building. This includes many of the members involved in the campus political group SLATE in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Oral History Center’s SLATE Oral History Project documents the experiences and budding political consciousnesses of some of the students involved in on-campus activism at UC Berkeley sixty years ago.
SLATE was a political party on UC Berkeley’s campus from 1958 to 1966 and, therefore, predated the Free Speech Movement. Its main goal: to present candidates for the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) office who supported racial equality and free speech on campus.
Jackie Goldberg, an undergraduate social science major in the mid-sixties, was one of the most well-known student activists involved in SLATE at UC Berkeley. She initially joined SLATE because of her passion for civil rights, as well as the strong community and support from other student activists on campus at the time. Her oral history is a part of the Oral History Center’s Free Speech Movement Oral History Project but chronicles the work she did with SLATE in detail.
When she arrived on campus, Goldberg underwent a year of dorm living—still a staple of the UC Berkeley freshman experience. After that first year in the dorms, she encountered a lack of housing on and around campus, which is a lasting issue at Cal. To secure housing for her second year, she participated in the sorority rush process and became a member of Delta Phi Epsilon. Goldberg claims that due to her Jewish background, most other houses declined to offer her membership. Experiencing this prejudice firsthand likely later influenced her activism in fighting discrimination in Greek life. In her oral history, she describes her housing journey as such:
I had applied to the co-op. I had applied to the dorms, and I didn’t get any of them. I was on the wait list for both. So my game plan was I would go in for a semester, try to grow up so I could get an apartment, find someone to get an apartment with…but it turned out that I was in this free-wheeling place, with a lot of nice people, some of whom are still my friends…and it was so easy. I didn’t have to cook, I didn’t have to clean, I didn’t have to shop, and it was cheap because I was doing the house bills.
Despite originally joining the sorority for housing reasons, Goldberg grew an affinity for the culture of her house and its lifestyle. In her oral history, she recalls: “I stayed all three years. I had no desire to leave.”
Goldberg thrived in community with other members of Delta Phi Epsilon and SLATE during her time at UC Berkeley. Her activist work and living situation occasionally overlapped, like while advocating for the racial integration of sororities at Cal. At the time, Greek life had a vast political presence on campus; Goldberg both embraced and challenged this precedent to incite political change at UC Berkeley. She succeeded in encouraging other sororities to desegregate, despite the decision sometimes diverging from their national organizations and sister-chapters.
Julianne Morris, another member of SLATE, had a less positive experience in an all-women’s housing arrangement around the University of California, Berkeley’s campus. While studying at UCLA, Morris founded the organization PLATFORM, inspired by conversations she’d had with members of SLATE. After craving more involvement in student politics, she transferred to UC Berkeley in the early 1960s and selected housing based on connections she’d previously made through SLATE. Morris recalls:
My first semester I was in a co-op, Stebbins Hall, and so I met a lot of women friends there. And of course, you know, it was very different then. There was a curfew, where you had to be in—and God forbid that there were any men there at night.
Even in the sixties, the University maintained in loco parentis authority over its female students from which it exempted male students. These unequal restrictions were especially apparent when it came to women’s housing accommodations. Because of this, although she found community both in SLATE and at Stebbins, Morris eventually sought more autonomy by moving to her own apartment after one semester in the co-op system. She explains:
Oh, I liked the idea of being freer. And you know, I hated having to come in at a certain time and no men in the house and the whole way things were at that time. And so I was very happy not to be in a dorm or a co-op anymore and be on my own.
Despite graduating sixty years ago, many of the buildings around UC Berkeley’s campus are part of a continuous built environment that would be physically recognizable to Morris and her peers.
In 2024, there are still two Berkeley co-ops designated for female-identifying students only, but no all-male-identifying cooperatives remain. One historically men-only house was Barrington Hall, which closed in 1989.
David Armor, a founding member of SLATE, lived in Barrington Hall while attending UC Berkeley, and participating in student government and campus activism. In 1959, he became the first and only member of SLATE to be elected as ASUC President. Armor describes his experience living at the student cooperative Barrington Hall during his freshman year as such:
Again, as a very poor student, I chose the cheapest housing, which was…a cooperative, Barrington Hall, terrible building, really not in good shape…there was a two-person bedroom, two two-person bedrooms, and then a one-person bedroom, so five people sharing a bathroom. And co-op means that you did the work…You work. You did the food, the serving, the cleaning, and everything, that’s how you paid, why the fees were so low. So you basically worked to provide all the services.
However, after a semester, Armor also decided to transition to an apartment. While making this change, he and his roommates integrated some of the cooperative practices they adopted from Barrington into their new living dynamic. Armor reports this influence as having a positive impact on his development as a young adult:
So we got an apartment in the second semester of my freshman year, and five roommates, and we divided up the chores, cooking and whatever, and that was a great experience, because we [were] becoming independent, and living on our own.
Armor’s desire for strong community and cooperation mirrors the effective practices of SLATE’s grassroots political advocacy approach. Housing was one of the main issues of SLATE’s political platform, and the group supported the Berkeley Fair Housing Ordinance in 1959. SLATE also opposed the University’s compulsory ROTC program for male freshmen and sophomores. Members defined SLATE by its beliefs in student organizations, advocacy, and the right for personal academic freedom on UC Berkeley’s campus and its surrounding areas. Communal living, even on an apartment scale, is still a method of community building for students at UC Berkeley. In addition, cooperative living situations are often regarded as financially accessible for a wide range of students looking for housing in Berkeley. Armor and other SLATE participants likely resonated with communal styles of living because of their political and personal beliefs, as well as their material needs.
Over the past sixty years, both Barrington Hall and the UC Berkeley chapter of the Delta Phi Epsilon sorority have closed; the physical structures where they were once housed are the largest reminders and evidence of their impact on campus. Stebbins Hall, Morris’s first housing experience at Cal, is still operational as a student cooperative, and has been co-ed since 1971. In short, the built environment since the time of the Free Speech Movement on Berkeley’s campus has both endured and been changed in ways that would feel substantial to former students and members of SLATE.
The activists highlighted here craved more autonomy and less censorship in both their campus and housing climates. They were able to socially campaign for their beliefs as a result of cross-community building practices. Goldberg, Morris, and Armor all lived in houses with a built-in social element; this was likely a great opportunity for idea-sharing and recruitment for SLATE’s cause, as well as a way to foster meaningful connections with their housemates. Their interviews reveal the importance and impact of these connections, as well as the places in which they were formed. What these narrators recall best from their time at UC Berkeley—outside of their work with SLATE—is not classes or grades, but instead the places they lived and the communities of people they built in those places. Indeed, Goldberg, Morris, and Armor’s individual memories of student-led activism and the communities that emerged from, and around, that work have remained strong sixty years on.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Freedom Summer and Its Legacy: Berkeley Sixty Years Later
By Sophia Faaland
Sophia Faaland is a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying history. They are an Undergraduate Research Apprentice and Archaeological Field Student for the Nemea Center. Sophia works at the Oral History Center as a student editor.
Freedom Summer in 1964 was a landmark moment in the Civil Rights Movement that challenged systemic racism in the United States. Activists—typically white, college-educated, and from Northern states—volunteered to travel to Mississippi and Louisiana to direct national media attention towards Jim Crow Laws and racist violence that prevented Black people from voting in Southern states. The ultimate goal of Freedom Summer was to end racial inequality in the Deep South, and ensure constitutional liberties for all people living in the United States. Organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) all recruited, trained, and coordinated activists for Freedom Summer. Once there, activists faced the legacy of deeply-rooted systemic racism in the United States that had shaped elections.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, politicians in the American South designed excessively complex voter registration forms in order to privilege white people attempting to register over Black people—regardless of the quality of responses. For instance, forms without a dot above the letter “i” would be disregarded entirely if they were filled out by a Black person. To combat this, Freedom Summer activists provided workshops for Black residents to navigate deliberately unforgiving voter registration forms, and taught literacy classes in Freedom Schools.
This moment in history drew on decades of activism from the Black community, accelerating the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. The integrated effort of Freedom Summer helped popularize the movement for civil rights legislation across the country, and reached many pockets of American society, including the UC Berkeley campus. On this sixtieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, it is important to acknowledge that the movement did not happen long ago. This recent, violent struggle for civil rights illustrates the aggressive power of white supremacy in American society and its persistence in American politics. UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center features interviews with narrators who experienced this critical moment in civil rights history firsthand. Their memories of civil rights activism include the period before Freedom Summer, during Freedom Summer itself, and the movement’s impact on UC Berkeley. The Oral History Center does not currently have any interviews of Black activists who participated in Freedom Summer.
Before Freedom Summer, UC Berkeley Professor Olly Wilson was a Black participant in civil rights activism across the United States. In the late 1950s, while working to obtain his bachelor’s of music at Washington University, he was also an active member of CORE, where he volunteered for test cases. Civil rights organizations frequently used test cases to prove racial discrimination and, subsequently, define new anti-discriminatory law. Wilson recalls the process of gathering evidence of racial inequality for CORE test cases:
What we would do is to have a Black person go into a hotel or restaurant by himself and he would either be served or not served. Then you’d have a Black and a white person go in and they would be served or not served. Then you would have a white person go in, the same white person go in by themselves, and you are both creating valuable data for legal challenges and pointing out the inanity of it all.
In 1960, Wilson accepted an academic appointment at the University of Florida A&M, and traveled to the Deep South with his wife, Elouise. On this journey, he witnessed Jim Crow laws in action and stark segregation for the first time. In his oral history, Wilson discusses Elouise’s experience of determining the correct car while transferring trains in New Orleans. He describes how segregation was discriminatory and nonsensical:
When she gets in the train, she notices that this is a brand new, beautiful, clean car, and she looked in the corner and nobody else was there but white folks, you know. So, she was wondering, “Well, maybe I am in the wrong car…” Now, Elouise is light skinned, and sometimes, if you don’t look at her right, you know, you might not know what race she is, you know. So, she was afraid people didn’t look at her right, so she came out, because she thought, “Well, if I get on this car and then Olly comes, they are definitely going to send him to the Black car, and I will be up here and he will be at that end…”
One year after the Wilsons’ journey to Florida, Freedom Riders boarded buses and trains through Mississippi to advocate for legislation ending segregation on interstate public transportation. In 1961, Mimi Feingold Real, a civil rights activist with CORE, was jailed for her participation in the Freedom Rides. Feingold Real recalls that the purpose of the Freedom Rides was to draw national media attention to Mississippi’s segregationist laws:
What we were doing—it was twofold, again—we were testing the system, doing a little stress test. But we were also, by the time I joined, we were also doing sort of a jail-in in Mississippi, that one of the ways to create pressure on the State of Mississippi was to have—first of all, to have all these Freedom Riders flooding into the state. But we all, as a condition of our being accepted, we had to agree that we would stay in jail for forty days. And that had to do with a quirk in the law in Mississippi, that you had forty days to post bail, and if you had not posted bail by forty days, you forfeited that right. So CORE was going to bail us out, but we were going to stay in that full forty days. That would force Mississippi, of course, to house us and clothe us and feed us and put up with all the national publicity that would arouse, and that would be one more way to pressure, at least the State of Mississippi, to discontinue this odious practice of segregated interstate transportation facilities.
Feingold Real extended her career in civil rights activism by continuing to work with CORE in Louisiana. She became a Freedom School teacher in the East Feliciana Parish teaching literacy, and showing Black residents how to navigate voter registration. In her oral history, she describes her philosophy of work as a Freedom School Teacher in 1963:
This wasn’t any sort of top-down endeavor, this is giving people the power to act on their own. It’s not trying to put pressure on the federal government to come in, and from the top-down force the white people in the South to do something that will allow Black people to do something else. I mean, in a way that was one of the ideas. But the basic idea was power to the people, giving people the initiative to make their own decisions and to have control of their lives. And that’s what I was doing on a person-to-person basis.
Chude Pamela Allen began participating in civil rights activism in 1964 when she heard the director of SNCC Freedom Schools, Staughton Lynd, speak in a seminar titled “Nonviolence in America” at Spelman College. Lynd inspired her to travel to Mississippi during Freedom Summer with the SNCC and help ensure Black people’s right to vote. She recalls the shift in political opinion about the protection of civil rights activists after the murder of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in June 1964:
And one of the first things we were then asked to do was to divide up by states, and then contact our parents and relatives to contact their congressmen and ask for safety for the civil rights workers. I did that, and my father did contact his congressmen. And later I learned, because his congressman—at least one of them called him up and said, “Get her out of there.” And my father who, as I’ve defined, was not what we think of as a political activist, but he said very clearly to his congressman, “This is not about her safety. It’s about all their safety.” That kind of shift—and that’s just, again, that reference to the fact that when you get involved in something, people around you can also have their own—they grow, too, or they can grow, depending on whether they support you.
To help combat social and political barriers Black activists faced, Freedom Summer activists were an integrated group. In her oral history interview, Allen reflects on adjusting to safety precautions in the Deep South, and becoming more aware of the nature of racist violence. Allen recalls that white activists did not always respect the danger integrated activism created for their Black colleagues during Freedom Summer:
I heard one story, as an example, of a white woman who did not want to hide on the floor under a blanket when riding in a car with a number of Black people, mostly men. I can remember the worker who then said he wouldn’t ride in a car with her anymore, because she insisted on sitting up. She insisted, “I have the right to be seen.” But of course, in that situation, she wasn’t the one that was going to get beaten to a pulp.
Even across the country, Berkeley students and university administrators felt the social and political repercussions of Freedom Summer. In 1964, UC administrators punished students exercising political speech that the university deemed unacceptable—beginning the debate on the limits of campus free speech. Prohibited topics of speech included civil rights and anti-Vietnam War advocacy. One of the first students arrested during the Free Speech Movement, Jack Weinberg, tabled in Sproul Plaza with CORE to raise money for civil rights work after returning from Freedom Summer activism in Mississippi. His arrest for speech on civil rights sparked a spontaneous sit-in protest around the police car detaining him that lasted thirty-two hours until he was released (seen in the first photo). Atop the police car at the protest for Weinberg’s release, Cal student Mario Savio gave a rousing speech to the crowd on the fundamental right to speech, and later became instrumental in organizing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Savio had also returned from Mississippi for Freedom Summer before his organization of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Thus, it was not a coincidence that the Free Speech Movement became a mass protest on the UC Berkeley campus the same year Freedom Summer occurred. This debate on speech and advocacy played a pivotal role in shaping the protections of student and faculty rights to free political speech at UC Berkeley today.
UCB professor Leon F. Litwack witnessed this shift in student activism at the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. In his oral history, Litwack remarks on the similar philosophies of Freedom Summer and the Free Speech Movement:
Of course, Mario Savio had just come back from the Mississippi summer when he came back to Berkeley in 1964. At places like Berkeley and other places around the country significant numbers of young people came to believe that direct personal commitment to social justice was a moral imperative and that social inequities are neither inevitable nor accidental but reflect the assumptions and beliefs and decisions of people who command enormous power, including the university administrators. Well, these were important perceptions. So what began at Berkeley as a protest to obtain a very traditional liberal freedom, freedom of speech and advocacy, soon brought into question the official version of reality.
In all, the legacy of Freedom Summer in 1964 is a historically significant moment that accelerated voting protections for Black people in the United States, and inspired the movement to protect free speech on all university campuses—starting at UC Berkeley. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 solidified the work of civil rights activists, and encoded anti-discriminatory practices into federal law. In the sixty years since Freedom Summer, Berkeley students have utilized their freedom of speech to address many other political issues, and as a result, the university has a reputation for vibrant political dialogue. The debate about the limits of free speech continues to this day as the University of California system grapples with Pro-Palestinian student activism. Indeed, on August 19, 2024, UC Berkeley announced its new policy for “expressive activity,” revising the previous agreements on freedom of speech for the coming academic year.
To learn more about the history of student activism at Berkeley, the Oral History Center collections include many other interviews, including the SLATE and Free Speech Movement oral history projects. For more information on women’s activism throughout the twentieth century, please visit the Women Political Leaders collection. To learn more about Black activists involved in the Civil Rights Movement and their legacies, see Charles M. Payne’s book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Finally, the UC Berkeley Library holds a wide variety of secondary sources on Freedom Summer, available here.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Celebrating the Work of Freedom to Marry, Through Oral History
By Katie Gonzales
The Oral History Center’s Freedom to Marry collection features interviews from key members of the Freedom to Marry organization. Officially launched in 2003 by Evan Wolfson, the campaign worked to legalize same-sex marriage across the United States. The campaign originally worked on helping same-sex couples get married on a smaller case-by-case scale, as at the time, no state in the country had legislation protecting same-sex marriage. The first state to even do so was Massachusetts in 2004. Throughout the organization’s lifespan, same-sex marriage went from being legally unprotected on a state level to federally protected as an unequivocal right across the United States.
However, in June 2024, the Supreme Court countered this ruling in Department of State v. Muñoz, in which it declared that the right to bring a noncitizen spouse to the United States is not constitutionally protected. This ruling could be detrimental towards married same-sex citizens and noncitizens who would have to leave the United States, a country where their marriage is legal, back to a home country where it isn’t.
Given the June 2024 Supreme Court ruling, as well as this being Pride month, it’s a great time to look back on the work that Freedom to Marry did to legalize same-sex marriage. The lessons from the organization remain as important today as they were twenty years ago. When initially proposing the Freedom to Marry campaign to potential investors, Wolfson remembers:
I would be saying things to them like, look, if you just want to sprinkle some money around and do some ordinary building programs and helping people, I’m not the right person for you. And if you want to stay in your work up till now, which has been primarily in the Bay Area, and certainly only in California, not nationally, I’m definitely not the right guy for you. But if you really want to make a difference, what you really ought to do is support a campaign to win the freedom to marry. They went, “Marry?” “Yes, marriage. Marriage is the engine of change, marriage is what we’re going to have to be fighting for. You can do good work this way, but if you want to be transformational, you need to do this.”
One major battle that Freedom to Marry faced was when Proposition 8 passed in California. This ballot proposition intended to ban same-sex marriage measure passed in 2008. At the time, this was a massive blow to Freedom to Marry’s campaign, especially due to California’s reputation as a more progressive state. Tim Sweeney, a member of Freedom to Marry’s board of directors, recalls:
We were just devastated. It was devastating. Right? In California, the progressive beacon of the west, right? And we lost handily. It wasn’t close, which would have just taken a bit of the sting out of it. But what was interesting is the number of non-LGBT people who were outraged that their friends and family that they loved and cared about were basically being told you’re second-class citizens and your love is not legitimate. It created such a wave of we’re going to commit ourselves to fix this. And we have to be willing to be with them in their anger, invite them in in a new way, let them lead with us. All of that is hard to do, I think, in a social movement because you get worried they don’t really get it, their message is not your message, are they going to do some half measure, are they going to compromise, what do they know? But you got to kind of trust that they’re with you and you got to really in some cases step aside and realize, for instance, the message you may say to yourself or within the community is different than the one the non-LGBT community needs to hear. And maybe they need to have different messengers that just talk about the journey in a way that maybe an LGBT person wouldn’t sound authentic or real on. So that was just such an interesting moment. It’s almost like after Prop 8 we needed to step back a bit and let the world realize, “Wait a minute, what happened here? This is not okay.”
After the loss in California, support for LGBT rights increased due to the sheer amount of media coverage of the loss nationally. A Pew poll from 2010 cited that over 60% of Americans supported same-sex marriage, a drastic difference from polls in the 1990s that cited 60% of Americans against same-sex marriage. But by 2012, President Barack Obama made his support for same-sex marriage clear, stating that his views had “evolved” since his first presidential term. Thalia Zepatos, the Director of of Research and Messaging for Freedom to Marry recalls in her 2016 interview the impact of Obama’s statement:
I think really two things happened. One was that Governor [Martin] O’Malley really got involved in the campaign, but the big one was that our long-term effort to really engage the White House and President Obama came to fruition, you know not long before the election and President Obama made his statement in support of same-sex marriage, and within twenty-four hours, polling support for marriage among black voters in Maryland went up by twenty points. I mean, it was the biggest single day increase I’ve ever seen anywhere and I think it contributed just in a very great way.
By 2015, 37 states had legalized same-sex marriage, but it would not be a federal right until the Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which argued that same-sex marriage was a right under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court announced its ruling: same-sex marriage was guaranteed as a fundamental right. The same night, the White House was bathed in rainbow lights, an unmistakable show of support for the ruling. Jo Deutsch, Freedom to Marry’s federal director from 2011-2015, recounted this event:
It was a truth that, from every level, we had won. It was an acknowledgement from the President of the United States that our lives and our marriages mattered, in a just obvious way…This is the symbol of America and the symbol of the President of the United States, all in rainbow color. It was just breathtaking and so beautiful…We had come so far through our lives from asking can we walk down the street holding hands, or can we actually, in an introduction, say this is my wife? And now to this moment, there we were in front of the White House, in all of its colorful glory, with all of these people holding hands. I can’t tell you how many proposals we saw, with people just dropping to their knees right and left. It was like, another one dropping to their knees, and everybody started to clap. It was just phenomenal.
As the end of Pride month nears, it is important to remember that it hasn’t even been 10 years since the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. In many other countries around the world it is still taboo or even illegal. When we celebrate Pride month, it’s important to remember the work that many people and organizations did to ensure LBGTQIA rights, especially as they continue to face challenges. Celebrations can only happen as a result of triumph over tribulations, and should be remembered together.
Katie Gonzales is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying English and Anthropology. She works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
New Oral History from the OHC – Greg Moore: Executive Director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
The San Francisco Bay Area is known for the kind of environmental advocacy that has become a model for regions around the country. There’s a long legacy, spanning decades, of people behind this work. Greg Moore is one of these people. Greg has dedicated his career to conserving public lands and making parks accessible for all. He, too, has become a model, someone to whom people throughout the country – and world – look for guidance.
Greg served as the executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy from 1986 until his retirement in 2019. The GGNPC was founded in 1981 and its mission is to preserve the Golden Gate national parks, enhance the park visitor experience, and build a community dedicated to conserving the parks for the future. But his work in the environmental sector began long before 1986, dating back to his time as a student at UC Berkeley in the newly-formed Conservation of Natural Resources School and College of Environmental Design, during the environmental decade of the 1970s when the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and regulatory laws, like the Clean Water Act, were passed. And even before that, when he was a ranger with the National Park Service.
I had the privilege of sitting down with Greg in 2022 to interview him about his life and work. In preparation for the sixteen hours I would end up spending with him, I spoke with a number of people who know him in different capacities – former fellow National Park Service rangers; as well as Conservancy board members, employees, and donors. One thing was clear: Greg is universally respected for his work and his collegiality. I kept hearing about how, as both a colleague and manager, he listened to people and carefully considered their perspectives. About how, as the executive director of the Conservancy, he wrote heartfelt letters to board members each year, letters that they all not only save, but cherish. About how he would write and perform in an annual musical parodying popular songs for year-end parties.
But what struck me the most was how present Greg was during each phase of our interview sessions. Whether we were discussing how he developed a love for music as a child; his studies at Cal and then later at the University of Washington; meeting his wife, Nancy, and raising their son; or his love for parks; the development of his career; managing a large staff and multi-million dollar fundraising campaigns; and working to make parks accessible for all, Greg took every question I asked seriously, responding sincerely and weaving in humor throughout.
Greg is perhaps best known for his work with the Conservancy. He played a role in the creation of the organization, which he discussed in more detail in his oral history, before becoming the executive director. There are an incredible array of projects on which he worked during his tenure with the Conservancy, like various habitat restorations, converting the Presidio from an Army base to a park, transiting Fort Baker from a military base into a national park, promoting citizen science through the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, transforming Crissy Field into one of San Francisco’s crown jewels and creating the beloved Crissy Field Visitor Center, developing community partnerships and youth programs, and shepherding the Tunnel Tops project into existence. The list goes on.
The underlying theme of each of these projects was the drive to make parks accessible for everyone. “Parks for All” is the beating heart of the Conservancy’s mission. Here’s what Greg said about the origin of the mission:
“The ‘Parks For All’ came when the Conservancy was trying to think through how to simply and straightforwardly describe our mission. The Conservancy had a mission statement, but like many it was probably twenty-five to thirty words long, and I began thinking about how to put that in simple words that were very direct and, in some way, have the power-of-three impact. That’s when I began thinking, Well, of course, we’re about ‘parks.’ These are the physical places that we need to transform and enhance. Then we’re about ‘for all’ because these places are owned by every person in the United States as national parks, and then our final responsibility is ‘forever’ – to pass them from one generation to the next. It not only summarized our mission but almost described a theory of change that first you have the places and to make them for all youth to improve and enhance them. You have an opportunity to engage people in their enjoyment, in their stewardship, in their contributions for all, and then finally all the restoration work that cares for these places that you’ve enhanced and taken care of.”
Greg wanted to make sure people were aware that the parks existed, they felt comfortable there, and that they were relevant to the visitor’s life experience. He did this by bringing communities into planning conversations, implementing a bus route that would drive people from their neighborhoods to the parks and then back again, partnering with public libraries, and creating a multitude of programs – for kids, related to art, and citizen science for civilian park goers. Greg’s commitment to the Conservancy’s simple mission is what made the organization so successful and such an integral part of life in the Bay Area. And Greg’s interest in working with communities and listening to people – his colleagues, board members, donors, and park users alike – is what has made him such a towering figure in the Bay Area’s environmental movement.
It is with great excitement that we announce Greg Moore’s oral history is now publicly available.
Oral History Center Presents Work at NCPH in Utah and Explores “Belonging” in Japanese American History
In April 2024, Oral History Center (OHC) interviewers Amanda Tewes, Shanna Farrell, and Roger Eardley-Pryor traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah, where we presented our work on the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project at the annual meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH). We also joined a pilgrimage to the central desert of Utah along with other public historians and several members of the Wakasa Memorial Committee, including survivors and descendants of the Topaz prison camp in Utah, one of the ten US government mass incarceration sites where Japanese Americans were unjustly imprisoned during World War II. Our experiences in Utah at NCPH and at Topaz reiterated how history remains a powerful and living force, and how oral history can help promote that power. Difficult questions about “belonging” appear throughout many of the oral histories in OHC’s Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives project, and those same questions punctuated much of our time in Utah this past April.
“Historical Urgency” was the conference theme for this year’s meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) in Salt Lake City, where some 740 attendees presented, networked, and learned together. Presentation topics included community engagement, particularly with communities whose histories face urgent existential threats; communicating the critical importance of history and historical thinking; discourse and dialogue in a time of extreme social polarization; exploration of oral history, especially the collection of oral histories from older generations; and repatriation of human remains and cultural objects. As noted by NCPH president Kristine Navarro-McElhaney, conference discussions highlighted how historians’ work for public audiences remains essential to the fabric of our society, especially during this time of political and cultural polarization—and yet historical perspectives, tools, and history workers themselves have increasingly come under threat. While urgency may seem in opposition to the often slow and deliberate work that oral historians and other public historians do to build trust and lasting relationships with the communities we serve, many of us cannot help but feel a strong sense of urgency and importance in our efforts to collaboratively excavate the past and elevate community stories in ways that help make meaning in the present.
We felt especially honored to share at this NCPH our work on the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project. Our roundtable presentation recounted the project’s origins, the trauma-informed interviewing approach we used with these oral histories, and some of emergent themes from the project’s interviews, like “belonging,” “art and expression,” “healing,” and “memorialization.” The roundtable’s discussion was moderated by Hanako Wakatsuki-Chong, the Executive Director of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon and a former National Park Service Ranger who recorded her own oral history as part of the project. Nancy Ukai and Masako Takahashi, both of whom also recorded oral histories as part of the project, attended and also presented at the NCPH conference in Utah, where they heard portions their own oral history interviews during our presentation. Our presentation included audio clips from season 8 of The Berkeley Remix podcast, “From Generation to Generation”: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration,” as well as graphic narrative artwork by Emily Ehlen, all based on oral histories recorded for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project.
Relatedly, during the NCPH conference, I (Roger Eardley-Pryor) joined other public historians for a tour of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on the University of Utah campus to see a new exhibit titled Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo. The exhibition was curated by Professor ShiPu Wang of UC Merced and features over 100 paintings and works on paper by these three Japanese American women artists, all critically acclaimed with long and productive careers. Yet during World War II, both Hibi and Okubo were unjustly incarcerated in Utah at Topaz, along with Hayakawa’s parents. Pictures of Belonging follows the three artists’ prewar, wartime, and postwar art practices, sharing an expanded view of the American experience by women who used artmaking to take up space, make their presence and existence visible, and assert their own belonging. Many of the exhibit’s artworks are on view to the public for the first time. The exhibit’s titular theme of “belonging” resonated nicely with the Oral History Center’s Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project at UC Berkeley, and Okubo even earned her Master in Fine Arts degree in 1938 from UC Berkeley. Our tour of the art exhibit was co-led by Sarah Palmer, Head Exhibition Designer at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and by Dr. Kristen Hayashi, Director of Collections Management & Access and Curator at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. I am especially grateful I could tour Pictures of Belonging with Masako Takashashi, who herself is an outstanding multi-media artist, was born behind barbed wire at the Topaz prison camp in Utah, and who I worked with to record her forthcoming oral history interview for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project.
Our visit to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts also included another new exhibit titled Chiura Obata: Layer by Layer, which presents an in-depth look at the creation and conservation of Obata’s beautiful “Horses” silk screen painting from 1932. Chiura Obata was an esteemed artist and professor at UC Berkeley who was also incarcerated during World War II at Topaz in Utah, where he and Miné Okubo taught art classes for their fellow Japanese American incarcerees. Kimi Kodani Hill, the granddaughter of Chiura Obata, recently presented at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on her grandfather’s life and work, and I’m grateful that during our recent meeting in Berkeley, prior to my own Utah trip, she shared stories with me about Obata’s silk screen exhibit. During the screen’s 2022 conservation treatment, conservators at Nishio Conservation Studio discovered that the four-paneled screen contained hidden full-scale preparatory charcoal drawings of the horses. In addition, they found that the screen’s internal layers were made of practice drawings by Professor Obata and his summer 1932 students. The recently conserved screen, the full-scale under-drawings, and a selection of the practice drawings were all on display at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, along with a short film on the conservation process, which itself is an artform. After we returned to the Bay Area, Kimi Kodani Hill provided a guided tour of another exhibition with forty of Chiura Obata’s watercolors, woodblock prints, and ink paintings from several decades of his life that are currently displayed through mid-July at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
On April 11, 2024, in Salt Lake City at the NCPH conference, Masako Takahashi and Nancy Ukai joined other members of the Wakasa Memorial Committee to present their own panel titled “Who Writes Our History?” This panel explored the life and tragic death of James Hatsuaki Wakasa, who was shot and killed while confined in Topaz eighty-one years earlier on April 11, 1943. Their panel also addressed urgent and ongoing challenges over descendant and survivor community consent and collaboration with the Topaz Museum following the recent discovery and excavation of the Wakasa Memorial Stone from the Topaz incarceration site in 2021. That massive, 1,000-pound stone memorial was erected in 1943 by Japanese American incarcerees at Topaz just after James Wakasa’s murder there. But US government authorities quickly demanded the memorial’s destruction in their effort to bury acknowledgement of Wakasa’s death from a bullet fired by a white, nineteen-year-old US soldier who was quickly acquitted of any crime. The Wakasa Memorial Committee’s NCPH presentation, which was standing-room only, featured short films and personal reflections on the life, death, memory, and now-contested stone memorial of James Wakasa.
Two days later, still in Utah, Oral History Center interviewers and several other public historians joined Ukai, Takahashi, and other members of the Wakasa Memorial Committee on a pilgrimage to the dust-strewn ruins of the Topaz site on the edge of the Great Basin in Utah’s central desert. The bus ride out to the remote site included watching historical films and sharing personal backgrounds and reflections amongst this group that had assembled from eight different states. Hours later, we arrived at a sparse, sun-bleached landscape encircled by distant snow-capped mountains. Much of the original barbed wire fence around Topaz remains today where some 8,000 Americans were unjustly imprisoned for years during World War II. Crumbled concrete foundations mark sites of now-gone guard towers where US soldiers aimed their guns down at the Japanese American prisoners, and from where they occasionally fired shots, like the one that pierced James Wakasa’s heart in 1943. At the Topaz site, we joined members of the Topaz Museum Board, including board president Patricia Wakida; Scott Bassett, board secretary and education director at the Topaz Museum; and Topaz descendant and board member Dianne Fukami. Together, we all participated in a ceremony organized by the Wakasa Memorial Committee to commemorate Wakasa’s death, as well as the 140 people who died behind barbed wire at Topaz, and the sixteen Japanese American soldiers drafted from Topaz who died during their World War II military service.
The Wakasa 81st Memorial Ceremony at Topaz began at block 36-7-D, where James Wakasa’s tar-paper barracks once stood. From there, we re-traced Wakasa’s steps across the dusty and now-hauntingly empty landscape to the western perimeter site of his murder, near where the Wakasa Memorial Stone once stood before incarcerated Japanese Americans, under government orders to destroy the memorial, buried it in 1943. An artist’s large recreation of the stone, this one blazing white and made of paper mache and wood, stood near the former burial site of the stone memorial before its removal in 2021. After a land blessing and words of remembrance from survivors born at Topaz, we encircled the artist’s stand-in memorial with name tags bearing the names of our own ancestors. Joshua Shimizu then sang in both Japanese and English the hymn “Rock of Ages,” which was also sung at Wakasa’s funeral in April 1943, and which offered deeper meaning for the missing original Wakasa Memorial Stone.
During the “Rock of Ages” hymn, ceremonial participants attached to the base of the art installation many colorful paper flowers that carried tags naming other Japanese Americans who died in Topaz. The paper flowers we carried to the ceremony were made by Topaz survivors and descendants in honor of the paper floral blossoms folded by imprisoned Japanese Americans at Topaz in lieu of actual flowers for James Wakasa’s 1943 funeral. Miné Okubo, the artist whose work we saw earlier at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, drew several illustrations of Wakasa’s funeral while she was incarcerated at Topaz, including drawings of imprisoned women folding paper flowers to adorn wreaths and crosses. On the desert floor in April 2024, white paper flowers also surrounded the excavation site where the Topaz Museum Board excavated Wakasa’s Memorial Stone in 2021. The Wakasa 81st Memorial Ceremony at Topaz simultaneously evoked absence and living memory. It was especially meaningful to me (Roger) to join Nancy Ukai and Masako Takahashi at the ceremony after having worked together to record their oral histories, in which they shared intergenerational memories about James Wakasa and more recent memories about the Wakasa Memorial Stone’s recent rediscovery and removal from that site.
After the ceremony at Topaz, the pilgrimage group boarded the bus and traveled sixteen miles to the handsome Topaz Museum, which opened in 2017 after decades of fundraising and planning in the small town of Delta, Utah. Once there, the pilgrimage group found their way to the back of the museum where we gathered to witness the actual Wakasa Memorial Stone, a one-thousand-pound rock now confined in a small enclosure. After paying our respects to the stone, we toured the Topaz Museum’s exhibits and collections, which include hundreds of artifacts, photographs, and oral histories, as well as 150 pieces of original artwork. The Topaz Museum’s core exhibit explores the complex story of the World War II Japanese American incarceration experience, especially as it transpired at Topaz. The exhibit begins with the racist laws that marginalized early Japanese immigrants, which lead eventually to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The exhibit extends into the traumatic impacts of their exile, with an obvious focus on the Topaz experience, and it concludes with an examination of the Constitutional violations that the incarcerees were forced to endure. I found the Topaz Museum exhibits to be impressive, interactive, and informative. The pilgrimage group then gathered a final time out back by the Wakasa Memorial Stone before boarding the bus and returning to Salt Lake City.
The emotional experiences throughout our time in Utah reminded me of William Faulkner’s line in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The public history presentations on “historical urgency” at NCPH, the outstanding exhibits on Japanese American artists, the powerful pilgrimage to Topaz and the commemorative ceremony at the site of James Wakasa’s murder, which we shared with survivors and descendants of the prison camp eighty-one years from the date of Wakasa’s death, as well as our trip to the Topaz Museum to see its exhibits and the excavated Wakasa Memorial Stone all reminded us that history is still very much alive and shapes our present experiences. At both the Topaz incarceration site and at the Topaz Museum in Delta, we witnessed some of the still-simmering tensions between Topaz Museum Board members and members of the Wakasa Memorial Committee over what has happened and what will happen to the now-unearthed Wakasa Memorial Stone. Throughout all of those experiences in Utah, I kept thinking on the recurrent theme of “belonging,” including in the oral histories we continue to conduct in the Oral History Center’s Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project. “Belonging” carries multiple meanings and invites complex questions. Within what communities, or within which factions of communities, do we find and feel belonging? Throughout history, and up through the present, where have Japanese Americans found belonging? What about the physical artifacts of Japanese American history, like artwork created during World War II-era incarceration, or like the recently re-discovered Wakasa Memorial Stone? To whom do those objects belong? And importantly, who has the right to tell the history of artifacts, artwork, memorials, or lived experiences? To whom does this history belong?
Answers to questions of belonging are elusive because they’re always evolving. I do know, however, how grateful I feel to continue working with individuals and communities to record oral histories that empower narrators to share their own living memories and reflections on the past, and how the personal histories these interviews record will continue to shape our shared present moments. These experiences in Utah helped further inspire our ongoing work on the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project. We hope that you, too, can find inspiration and meaning in these stories, and that they might inform your own sense of belonging.
— Roger Eardley-Pryor, Oral History Center historian and interviewer
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. While we receive modest institutional support, we are a predominantly self-funded research unit of The Bancroft Library. We must raise the funds to cover the cost of all the work we do, including each oral history. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.